The convergence of the mobile telephone network, the static telephone network, and the IP network provides a myriad of communication options for users. If one seeks to contact another individual, he or she may do so by electronic mail or e-mail, instant messaging, wired or wireless telephone, personal computer, pager, personal digital assistant or PDA, and Unified Messaging or UM systems, to name but a few. With so many options, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine which option at a given point in time will provide the caller with the highest likelihood of contacting the desired individual or contactee. Trial and error and guesswork are the typical techniques used to contact the contactee, which more often than not leads to a waste of time and frustration on the part of the caller.
Various attempts have been made to provide a presence and availability system that can track temporally a person's presence and availability and thereby provide a contactor with the highest likelihood of contacting the person. This is typically effected by collecting information from communication devices associated with the person. Such systems can further permit the person to define their availability to be contacted generally and/or to defined groups of contactors and how that contactor or group of contactors may contact them. This can be effected by allowing the person to configure the contactor's access control settings. As will be appreciated, contactors can view the information regarding the availability of contactees and use that information to determine whether or not and how to initiate or continue communications.
Recently, the Session Initiation Protocol or SIP (which is a simple signaling/application layer protocol for data network multimedia conferencing and telephony) has been developed to facilitate media-independent signaling and the implementation of presence and availability systems. Although other protocols may be equally supportive of presence concepts, SIP provides an illustrative basis for the present invention. In SIP, end systems and proxy servers can provide services such as call forwarding, contactee and contactor number delivery (where numbers can be any naming scheme such as a conventional URL format), personal mobility (the ability to reach a contactee under a single, location-independent address even when the contactee changes terminals), terminal-type negotiation and selection (e.g., a contactor can be given a choice on how to reach the contactee), terminal capability negotiation, caller and callee authentication, blind and supervised call transfer, and invitations to multiparty conferences.
To provide these varied services, SIP uses a relatively simple message system. Contacts begin via an “INVITE” message (with the contactor's codec preferences) and an “OK” message (with the contactee's codec preferences). Various software entities may participate, namely registrars which maintain a map of the addresses of a given user at the current time, proxies which perform call routing, some session management, user authentication, redirect functions, and routing to media gateways, redirect servers which perform a subset of forwarding functions, and SIP location servers which maintain user profiles and provide subscriber registration. “Registration” is a mechanism whereby a user's communication device registers with the network each time he or she comes online or needs to charge existing registration and individual profiles are maintained that specify information for routing contacts based on a number of different criteria.
Even with the emergence of presence aware telecommunication systems, there is an increasing need to use telecommunication systems to realize presence awareness in other dimensions. By way of example, many enterprise organizations, particularly extremely large organizations, are unaware of all of the areas and levels of expertise and knowledge of large percentages, if not all, of their employees.
For example, in the context of a large financial company, such as a brokerage firm, an employee agent may receive a call from a critical client asking for an answer, within five minutes, whether he or she should invest in company XYZ. If the client fails to invest within five minutes, the stock price could rise, costing the client more money and increasing his or her risk while decreasing his or her return. If the agent knows nothing, or very little, about company XYZ, he is limited to performing a quick web search and/or asking other employees for relevant information about company XYZ (which is at best a hit-or-miss proposition). For the most part, these resources are the same resources available to the client. Whatever advice is given to the client will likely not be the best advice that could be provided by the available fluent resources of the financial company. The reason for the failure to provide the best advice is that the financial company has little awareness, as embodied by a central, employee accessible database, of the current fluency of its employees on topics of interest to its clients.